Interesting Books

This week I picked up two books which address the ongoing conflict with "terrorism", but specifically in the Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the FATA regions in two very different ways.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen and Oliver Relin talks about the efforts of an American from Montana to build schools in these war torn regions. Through a series of harrowing experiences, missteps, building local contacts, finding and cultivating locals who share his vision, Mortensen raises the money and dedicates his life to providing to the people of the frontier villages what their own government cannot. There's more to it than that, but suffice to say it raises a number of interesting issues about just what it is that the people who are on the other end of the "war on terror", the people whose hearts and minds are meant to be won, actually think about America, the West, those who fight in their name, and the kind of life that they want to live. I'd recommend reading this book most of all for what it touches on but does not dig too deep into (for example, the perception that Western aid agencies are more likely to help Buddhists than Muslims, for a whole host of real and imagined reasons).

In direct contrast is a book that I picked up yesterday and have just started to read -- Omar Nasiri's Inside the Jihad, which looks into the motivations of the people who fight on the other side on the "war on terror", through the memoirs of "Nasiri", a self described thief, arms dealer, con-man, and survivor who infiltrates extremist networks, ostensibly for Western intelligence services but at the same time comes across as an opportunist who despises his handlers as much as he despises the terrorists he's training with. More on this after I finish it.

The truth is that if we truly wish to prosecute this "war" to achieve its stated goals, we must treat with people like Nasiri as well as build the kind of goodwill that Mortensen has built with his efforts to address the basic needs of the other part of the battle, the people who have always been caught in between.